In businesses, conference room solutions require a conference phone and a laptop connected with a projector or monitor for providing a presentation. The typical setup is to have a call initiated on the conference phone plus the laptop connected to a video cable that drives the projector or monitor. A local area network cable connection is required for the laptop to gain network access. One drawback is that these cables are left lying on the table top causing clutter and must be passed around the room from one laptop to another if the presenter of the material in the room needs to change. In addition, the display configuration on the laptop often needs to be manipulated to get the output to display correctly on the projector or monitor in the room due to different maximum resolutions supported on the projector or monitor relative to the resolution that is setup on the laptop.
Users today are opting for other computing devices instead of a laptop for carrying their information. These devices include tablet computers or smartphones. Often, however, these types of individuals who are making a presentation are unable to do so because the monitor cable provided in the room is of the wrong type. The user must then rely on another meeting participant with a laptop and provide the presentation material via a universal serial bus stick or email so that it can be transferred to the laptop for display. Challenges occur when the meeting evolves, however, as it is often necessary for the presenter to present materials that were not intended to be shown. To overcome this, files must be transferred again to the laptop that is being used to display the presentation material. Traditionally, this has added complexity and reduced efficiency.
Video conferencing solutions are also becoming more popular in meeting rooms as companies look for ways to enable collaboration between geographically dispersed teams while minimizing travel costs. These video conferencing solutions are often separate from the conference phone, laptop and projector or monitor solution in the meeting room and typically provide their own computing platform and monitor. Because the system is separate, the presentation material being displayed in the meeting room is not integrated with the video conferencing display, diminishing the value that the video adds in terms of collaboration effectiveness. Video conferencing solutions also typically require their own separate networking and management infrastructure from the rest of the IP environment. Generally, setting up a meeting that includes presentation display, plus audio or video conferencing can be complex and time consuming.
An emerging solution that attempts to address these issues is known as a telecollaboration solution. These systems provide high quality audio and video conferencing capabilities as well as the ability to remotely access and share a user's desktop computer with other participants in a conference. The systems support multiple high resolution monitors for display of video and presentation material. Nevertheless, the costs of these telecollaboration solutions can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Because of the steep cost, they are not widely deployed within an organization being primarily limited to one or two meeting rooms. This limits user accessibility and diminishes its usefulness in terms of enabling collaboration between users in different geographic locations. These systems can also be complex and difficult for a user to get going. This is compounded by the fact that users of a conference room are in-frequent users and therefore do not benefit from repeated frequent use to aid them learning how to use the solution.
A system and method is therefore needed to enable collaboration within meeting rooms of an organization. At the same time, a cost efficient solution should be provided. These, as well as other related advantages and features, will be described in the present disclosure.